27 Facts About Denise Giardina

Denise Giardina's book Storming Heaven was a Discovery Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and received the 1987 W D Weatherford Award for the best published work about the Appalachian South.

Denise Giardina was born October 25,1951 in Bluefield, West Virginia, and grew up in the small coal mining camp of Black Wolf, located in rural McDowell County, West Virginia, and later in Kanawha County, where she graduated from high school.

Denise Giardina received a BA in history from West Virginia Wesleyan College in 1973.

Denise Giardina pursued graduate work at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, and was preparing to go to law school.

At this point Denise Giardina found a new spiritual home in the Episcopal church, which she found to be more broad-minded than the fundamentalist Methodism of her childhood.

Denise Giardina moved to Washington, DC, where she joined a peace campaign and lived communally with some radical Christians in an inner city outpost.

Denise Giardina later moved back to rural West Virginia for a while, then took a job as a congressional aide in Charleston.

In 2004 Denise Giardina was the Writer-In-Residence at Hollins University and taught a course in Virginia and West Virginia fiction.

Denise Giardina became the first statewide nominee of the new party in the 2000 general election.

Denise Giardina's platform included many of the environmental and miners' rights issues she worked on as an activist.

Denise Giardina says that though her writing focused her emerging political views, it took the controversy over mountain top removal mining to move her to political action.

Denise Giardina became interested in the Appallachian tradition of storytelling at an early age, and this oral literary heritage of the mountains informed much of her later work.

Denise Giardina began working on her first novel, Good King Harry, while living in Washington DC.

Denise Giardina completed the book, told in the first-person voice of King Henry V, after returning to West Virginia.

Denise Giardina wrote guest columns for The Charleston Gazette and submitted pieces to The Washington Post.

The mining camp Denise Giardina spent her childhood in was less than 100 miles from Blair Mountain and served as the model for the town of Winco in the novel.

Denise Giardina captures such aspects of life in Appalachia as religion and racism.

The decision to use dialect was a costly one for Denise Giardina, resulting in her scrapping nearly 500 pages of the original 3rd-person manuscript of Storming Heaven.

Denise Giardina moved to Durham, North Carolina while still working on the novel, got a bookstore job, and studied with novelist Laurel Goldman at Duke University.

The class helped Denise Giardina recognize the value of what she had been doing intuitively and gave her the confidence to teach writing.

Denise Giardina immersed herself in Bonhoeffer's life, attracted to the story because of the ambiguities of the situation.

Denise Giardina decided to shift from past to present tense for the book's final scenes, adding suspense to the question of whether the imprisoned Bonhoeffer would be freed by the advancing Allies.

Denise Giardina used lines from Mozart's Mass in C Minor to frame Bonhoeffer's saga and Germany's slide into Nazism and war, and the music's liner notes helped her build the character of SS officer Alois Bauer, a music lover who is a composite of Bonhoeffer's real interrogators.

In Fallam's Secret, published in 2003, Denise Giardina explores Appalachian magical realism within a time-travel murder-mystery.

In 2009, Denise Giardina published Emily's Ghost, a fictionalized biography of poet and novelist Emily Bronte.

In 2015, Denise Giardina announced she was working on a memoir and a new novel, and noted that she had begun writing plays, though none had yet achieved production.

In March 2020, George Fox University professor William Jolliff's book Heeding the Call: A Study of Denise Giardina's Novels was published by West Virginia University Press.